Aligning SSD

I decided to replace the old slow 5400 RPM hard drive in my Toshiba Satellite laptop with a new Kingston 256 GB SSD. I cloned the old drive to the new SSD drive and all went well. Windows 8.1 booted up fine and everything seemed to be normal, except that a couple of disk utilities I have reported that the partition on the new drive was not in alignment. I downloaded the latest version of the Paragon Professional Alignment Tool 4.0 which I purchased a couple of years ago. This version creates a CD/DVD which boots the computer and runs the alignment outside of Windows. When it runs there is a graphic displayed on the screen but nothing indicates that it is running the alignment. Then suddenly a menu appears that has no option to do the alignment. Thinking the alignment might have taken place in the background, I rebooted the machine and checked again to see if the partition was now in alignment. Both tools again reported that the partition still was not in alignment. I contacted Paragon for support and sent them log files but they have not answered after a week of waiting. Paragon is NOT a good company to deal with if you need support. I tried to do the alignment with a gParted CD but that also failed.

Does anyone have an answer as to why the SSD won't align or how to tell what the problem is?

The Following User Says Thank You to Paul T For This Useful Post:

SUCCESS!! I tried the Paragon alignment tool again, thinking I had missed a step somewhere, but it still failed to align the SSD. I then tried the Gparted tool, following the link Paul suggested. It aligned the SSD on the first try with no problems. Quite a nice tool and definitely one to keep in your tool box. Thanks Paul and satrow for your help.

CLiNT,
I ran WinSAT. It checks a lot of things in the computer to come up with a Windows Experience Index score (WEI). As far as I can tell it, doesn't change or optimize anything. The WEI is not displayed in Windows 8.1 so you don't know what it is. Therefore, what good is it?

I decided to replace the old slow 5400 RPM hard drive in my Toshiba Satellite laptop with a new Kingston 256 GB SSD. I cloned the old drive to the new SSD drive and all went well. Windows 8.1 booted up fine and everything seemed to be normal, except that a couple of disk utilities I have reported that the partition on the new drive was not in alignment. I downloaded the latest version of the Paragon Professional Alignment Tool 4.0 which I purchased a couple of years ago. This version creates a CD/DVD which boots the computer and runs the alignment outside of Windows. When it runs there is a graphic displayed on the screen but nothing indicates that it is running the alignment. Then suddenly a menu appears that has no option to do the alignment. Thinking the alignment might have taken place in the background, I rebooted the machine and checked again to see if the partition was now in alignment. Both tools again reported that the partition still was not in alignment. I contacted Paragon for support and sent them log files but they have not answered after a week of waiting. Paragon is NOT a good company to deal with if you need support. I tried to do the alignment with a gParted CD but that also failed.

Does anyone have an answer as to why the SSD won't align or how to tell what the problem is?

Thanks for your help,
Jarome

This is the biggest reason, no matter what type of drive it is...ssd/hdd. That I always do a clean install on a bare drive. For me it just save a lot of headaches.

CLiNT,
I ran WinSAT. It checks a lot of things in the computer to come up with a Windows Experience Index score (WEI). As far as I can tell it, doesn't change or optimize anything. The WEI is not displayed in Windows 8.1 so you don't know what it is. Therefore, what good is it?